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      ‘Taxilandia’ Review: The Mouth is Running, but Not the Meter

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      Modesto Jimenez, known as Flako, has turned cab theater into a genre, and his latest show takes place on a ride through Bushwick, Brooklyn.Cruising down Knickerbocker Avenue in the back of a vintage Lincoln Town Car on a sunny Friday afternoon, I was thrilled when the driver, Modesto Jimenez, played the Fabolous track “Brooklyn,” loudly. The song, the Lincoln’s smooth ride, life passing by on the busy streets — the combination hit like theatrical umami.If cab theater were a genre, Jimenez would have medallion-shaped awards. Seven years ago, he performed his play “Take Me Home” in a New York City cab for up to three people at a time. For his Oye Group company’s new “Taxilandia,” he drives around his central Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, regaling his tiny audience with stories and reminiscences, asides and historical tidbits, like the fact that in the 1970s and ’80s Bushwick was devastated by arson fires just as bad as the ones that laid waste to the Bronx.Jimenez, known as Flako, says the ride is not a tour, and discourages audience members from taking photos.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesJimenez, who goes by Flako, spent nine years driving a cab, and he handles the traffic with a calm confidence — which is reassuring because he also talks nearly nonstop, weaving between English and Spanish, scripted text and off-the-cuff exchanges with the passengers (a plexiglass barrier separates the front and back seats).As for Bushwick, he knows it inside and out. He was raised by his grandmother there after moving from the Dominican Republic as a child; his autobiographical show “¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn,” from 2018, supplied much of that back story.Jimenez prefaces “Taxilandia” by pointing out that it is not a tour (he discourages the fares/audience members from taking photos) but an experience. The car trip itself is just one part of a greater project that also includes the text-guided walk “Textilandia,” a 16-track playlist, storefront galleries, and virtual artists’ salons (now archived online).“Taxilandia” is a follow-up to Jimenez’s “Take Me Home,” a play he performed in cabs seven years ago.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs we slowly rolled down main thoroughfares and side streets, Jimenez sketched an impressionistic portrayal of an ever-changing neighborhood, stressing that Bushwick’s history is an ebb and flow of successive arrivals, of displacement and conflict but also of energy and reinvention. We passed the community institution El Puente, where he thrived as a kid, and the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge, which is now — you have one guess — an apartment building.The large breweries created by the German beer barons of the 19th century are long gone; the new Bushwick prefers microbreweries anyway. We double parked so he could dissect layers of graffiti, “and right across the street,” Jimenez gestured, “the gentrification bar.” While the car is briefly in neutral, he himself is anything but.His take on change is nuanced, though, and as a Bennington-educated artist Jimenez bridges various constituencies — he has appeared in shows by the experimentalist Richard Maxwell and at the thriving Off Off Broadway theater the Bushwick Starr, which is presenting “Taxilandia” with New York Theater Workshop, in association with the Tank.A stop along the way near the former Ridgewood Masonic Lodge. The show is part of a larger project that includes a text-guided walk, a playlist and art.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Lincoln was on the move again. On the right was a pizzeria that Jimenez claimed is the best in Brooklyn. When we passed another with a nearly identical name a minute later, I asked which slice he preferred and he started waffling. Eventually we made our way to the trendier part of the neighborhood, where young folks dine on rather more expensive pizza, and he dropped me off near a subway stop. For Bushwick, the ride continues.TaxilandiaThrough May 30; taxilandia.com More

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      Theater to Stream: A Musical Throwback and ‘The Normal Heart’

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      Highlights include concerts by Melissa Errico and Sutton Foster, and an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves.”In 2018, New Yorkers in the know were buzzing about a new musical at the tiny York Theater. That show, Mark Sonnenblick’s “Midnight at the Never Get,” was subtly daring and thought-provoking, underneath a conventional, even old-fashioned exterior. Thanks to a streaming production from the Signature Theater in Arlington, Va., it should reach the greater audience it richly deserves.Set in 1960s Manhattan, the intimate musical follows the wistful romance between a cabaret singer, Trevor, and a songwriter, Arthur, as they try to come up with a hit act while staying true to themselves. What, for example, should they do about the pronouns in their love songs? Sonnenblick’s original numbers, which brilliantly emulate a vintage sound, are perfectly executed pastiches that also stand on their own. Sam Bolen, who was in the York production and created the concept with Sonnenblick and Max Friedman, returns as Trevor. April 30-June 21; sigtheatre.org‘We Have to Hurry’Here’s an intriguing pairing: Elliott Gould and Kathleen Chalfant as flirting Florida retirees, in a new play by Dorothy Lyman. (Ever busy, Chalfant will appear in a live production of Karen Malpede’s “Blue Valiant” at a Pennsylvania art farm May 29 and 30.) Gould got his start in Broadway musicals, so with a bit of luck he’ll break into song. A girl can dream. May 1 and 2; broadwayondemand.comTaysha Marie Canales in “No Child…”via Arden Theatre Company‘No Child …’Nilaja Sun wrote and performed in this solo play, from 2006, based in part on her eight years of teaching in the New York City public school system. Now, the Arden Theater Company in Philadelphia is staging it with Taysha Marie Canales, who handles all the characters — students, teachers, janitors and more — orbiting the fictional Malcolm X High School as they try to put on the Timberlake Wertenbaker play “Our Country’s Good.” April 27-May 9; ardentheatre.org‘50in50: Shattering the Glass Ceiling’For the fifth anniversary of its “50in50” monologue series, the Billie Holiday Theater in Brooklyn wrangled a stunning lineup for this anthology of stories read by Black actresses — Marsha Stephanie Blake, Marla Gibbs, Sanaa Lathan, Audra McDonald, Anika Noni Rose, Gabourey Sidibe, Wanda Sykes, Vanessa Williams and many, many others. May 6-9; thebillieholiday.org‘Il Parle, Elle Chante: Mystery’The performer Melissa Errico and Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker, conclude their collaboration at the French Institute Alliance Française with a livestreamed (then on-demand) concert dedicated to the dark universe of noir fiction, more specifically its back-and-forth between the United States and France. The songs, featuring Tedd Firth on piano, include David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s “Laura” and the premiere of Gopnik and Peter Foley’s “We Live, We Love, We Lie, We Die.” The first two installments in Errico and Gopnik’s series, “Love” and “Desire,” are still available to stream. May 6; fiaf.org‘The Normal Heart’This one is by appointment only, so mark your calendar for the ONE Archives Foundation’s reading of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” with — deep breath — Sterling K. Brown, Jeremy Pope, Laverne Cox, Jake Borelli and Danielle Savre, among others. The foundation supports the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California libraries — said to be the largest of its kind in the world. Paris Barclay directs. May 8; onearchives.orgRaúl Esparza in “The Waves in Quarantine.”via Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘The Waves in Quarantine’When Lisa Peterson and David Bucknam’s adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel premiered in 1990, The New York Times wrote that the book, score and lyrics were “suffused with a Woolfian intensity and intoxication.” Now Peterson directs a revised, virtual version that she conceived with the actor Raúl Esparza, with additional music by Adam Gwon. In addition to Esparza, the cast includes Carmen Cusack, Nikki Renée Daniels, Darius de Haas, Manu Narayan and Alice Ripley. April 29-May 28; berkeleyrep.orgCabaretIn “Bring Me to Light,” Sutton Foster’s on-demand concert at New York City Center, she covers a decent amount of Broadway ground. A six-time Tony Award nominee and two-time winner, she will swing from golden oldies from “Camelot,” “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific” to excerpts from lesser-known shows, including “Anyone Can Whistle,” “Violet” and Andrew Lippa’s “The Wild Party.” April 28-May 31; nycitycenter.orgThere’s no rest on the virtual cabaret stages this month. John Lloyd Young is letting fans choose the songs for his “By Request” concert at the Space in Las Vegas. There is a 99 percent chance that they will select something from “Jersey Boys,” for which Young won a Tony in 2006. May 1-9; thespacelv.comJeremy Jordan in “Carry On,” presented by Feinstein’s/54 Below.Jenny AndersonIn New York, Feinstein’s/54 Below is covering different bases and constituencies with Jeremy Jordan’s “Carry On” (May 6-June 17) and Marilyn Maye’s “Broadway, the Maye Way” (May 8-June 19). 54below.comAt the GoodmanThe Goodman Theater in Chicago is out with two productions staged by Robert Falls, its artistic director. First is “Measure for Measure,” from 2013, a tale of bad hypocrisy and even worse policing that might feel resonant these days (through May 9). Next, Falls tackles a livestreamed staging of Adam Rapp’s “The Sound Inside,” a two-hander — in this case Mary Beth Fisher and John Drea — that has turned into a pandemic staple thanks to its relatively simple logistical demands and suspenseful pace (May 13-16). goodmantheatre.org‘Eurobeat: The Pride of Europe’The Will Ferrell movie “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” introduced many Americans to the glories of the title’s Pan-European competition. If you want to warm up before this year’s edition, May 18-22, stream an update of a revival, which The Guardian called a “sparkly, spandex-clad, bad-taste extravaganza” when it ran in the West End in 2008. In the Eurovision context, this description amounts to high praise. And yes, viewers can vote for the outcome. April 30-May 10; stream.theatre More

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      Rediscovering France’s Early Female Playwrights

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      A growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept: le matrimoine.PARIS — How many women had professional careers as playwrights in prerevolutionary France, between the 16th and 18th centuries? Go on, hazard a guess.The answer, according to recent scholarship, is around 150. Yet if you guessed the number was close to zero, you’re not alone. For decades, the default assumption has been that deep-seated inequality prevented women from writing professionally until the 20th century.Now a growing movement within French theater is reclaiming the work of forgotten female artists, and reviving a lost concept along the way: le matrimoine. Matrimoine is the feminine equivalent of patrimoine — translated as patrimony, or what is inherited from male ancestors. In French, however, patrimoine is also the catchall term to describe cultural heritage. By way of matrimoine, artists and academics are pushing for the belated recognition of women’s contribution to art history, and the return of their plays to the stage.Matrimoine is no neologism. “The word was used in the Middle Ages but has been erased,” said the scholar and stage director Aurore Evain. “Patrimoine and matrimoine once coexisted, yet at the end of the day all we were left with was matrimonial agencies.”When Dr. Evain started researching prerevolutionary female authors, around 2000, she quickly realized that French academics were behind their American peers. In the early 1990s, Perry Gethner, a professor of French at Oklahoma State University, had already translated plays by Françoise Pascal, Catherine Bernard and other 17th- and 18th-century women into English, and published them.At home, on the other hand, the idea that female colleagues of Molière had been overlooked collided with entrenched narratives. The classical French repertoire revolves around a trinity of male playwrights — Molière, Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille — whose works are taught in schools and widely seen as models of national literary genius.Yet all three men crossed paths with acclaimed female peers. “Le Favori” (“The Male Favorite”), a verse tragicomedy written in 1665 by Madame de Villedieu, was performed by Molière’s own company before the king at Versailles. When Dr. Evain staged it again in 2015, over three centuries after it was last performed, the French playwright and director Carole Thibaut was struck by the similarities between “Le Favori,” which revolves around a courtier who challenges the hypocrisy of royal favor, and Molière’s “Misanthrope,” written the next year.A portrait of Madame de Villedieu (1640-1683).The British Museum“I love Molière, but there are two scenes that are basically plagiarism,” Thibaut said in a phone interview. “He borrowed heavily from ‘Le Favori.’”Before the French Revolution, most female playwrights were upper-class single women who needed to earn a living. In the 19th century, their numbers kept growing: Scholars have found at least 350 women who were paid for their writing, from the revolutionary activist Olympe de Gouges to Delphine de Girardin, both of whom had plays in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. Many of them hosted literary salons, starting with Germaine de Staël; some, like George Sand, also wrote under a pseudonym to get around gender-based prejudice.Yet not a single one of these women has a meaningful presence on the French stage today. Until the late 2000s, even feminist writers knew nothing of their work. The first volume of a French anthology of prerevolutionary female playwrights (edited by Dr. Evain, Gethner and the New York University professor Henriette Goldwyn) wasn’t released until 2007.When Thibaut, who is now at the helm of a National Dramatic Center in the city of Montluçon, first heard Dr. Evain speak at a conference two years later, the notion of matrimoine came as a revelation. “I fell apart. I started crying,” she said. “She taught me that instead of being at the dawn of a feminist awakening, we were part of a cycle, which sees women emerge and then be erased.”That historical insight coincided with a renewed focus on gender inequality in French theater, in the wake of two government audits. Until 2006, none of the five national French theaters had ever had a female director. There has been some progress since: While only 7 percent of national and regional dramatic centers, the next tier of public institutions, were led by women in 2006, the proportion was 27 percent in 2019. Still, in March, an open letter published in the French newspaper Libération complained about the lack of women being appointed to top theater jobs since the start of the pandemic.From 2009 onward, Thibaut, Dr. Evain and other activists joined forces through an association, known as HF, to push for change, and matrimoine became one of their rallying calls. In 2013, Dr. Evain launched the annual “Days of the Matrimoine,” a festival that runs alongside the “Days of the Patrimoine,” a national celebration of France’s cultural heritage.That visibility is now affecting younger generations of scholars and artists, like Julie Rossello Rochet, a playwright who completed a doctoral dissertation last year on her 19th-century predecessors. In a phone interview, she said that studying their work had helped her process the unease she felt as a young writer: “I kept hearing, ‘Oh, it’s so rare, a woman who writes for the stage.’ Actually, it isn’t.”A performance of  Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”) directed by Aurore Evain. The play had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française.Carmen MariscalThe scholars interviewed agreed that women’s plays offer a different perspective from that of male playwrights — a female gaze, so to speak, shaped by the authors’ life experiences. “They promoted women’s intelligence,” Dr. Rossello Rochet said.“They created strong female characters, who choose politics over love, as well as male characters who choose love,” said Dr. Evain, who also pointed to the attention they paid to the role of fathers.The two prerevolutionary plays Dr. Evain has directed since 2015 speak to that originality. In addition to “Le Favori,” she brought back Madame Ulrich’s “La Folle Enchère” (“The Mad Bid”), a comedy that had its premiere in 1690 at the Comédie-Française. The plot cleverly toys with gendered expectations: In it, an older woman endeavors to marry a younger man, who is himself a woman in disguise. “It’s an early queer play, in which everything is upside down,” Dr. Evain said. “Order is never restored: The leading lady is in drag until the end.”While a handful of smaller theaters, like the Ferme de Bel Ebat in Guyancourt, have welcomed productions like “La Folle Enchère,” persuading programmers to invest in the matrimoine remains a challenge. The Comédie-Française, where multiple women have presented their work over the centuries, has yet to revive a single one of these plays.In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde in 2017, the troupe’s director, Eric Ruf, said he was “working on it,” but added that it would be hard to sell main-stage tickets for a “little-known” playwright. (A spokeswoman for the Comédie-Française declined to say whether there were plans to bring back plays by women in future seasons.)Yet feminists believe that unless these early women’s plays are performed and taught, history may yet repeat itself. “If we ignore our matrimoine, if we don’t change the way we think about our culture, the women who came after us may not leave a legacy, either,” Thibaut said.In the eyes of Dr. Rossello Rochet, the benefits are obvious for young playwrights. “Having a history has given me deeper roots,” she said. “It has made me feel stronger.” More

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      Sondheim Musical, in Development for Years, Looks Unlikely

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      The 91-year-old composer told the Public Theater last year that he was no longer working on a show based on the films of Luis Buñuel.One big lingering question for theater fans following the news that the prolific producer Scott Rudin will “step back” from his stage projects: What will happen to his shows in development, notably the Stephen Sondheim musical “Buñuel,” which at last report was slated to be produced Off Broadway at the Public Theater?Rudin, who is facing a reckoning over decades-long accusations of bullying, had been a commercial producer attached to the musical.But the Public now says: It isn’t happening.In the wake of reports about Rudin, the Public on April 22 put out a statement saying it had not worked with him in years. Responding to a follow-up question, Laura Rigby, a spokeswoman for the Public, said last week that Sondheim had informed the theater last year that he was no longer developing the musical. (The Public clarified that its cancellation had nothing to do with Rudin.)Sondheim, who turned 91 at the end of March, did not respond to emailed questions about the project’s status.The work, which was based on the films of the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, promised to be one of the last chances for theatergoers to see a new stage musical by musical theater’s most venerated composer. Sondheim had been developing it for the last decade or so with the playwright David Ives (“Venus in Fur”), who also did not respond to email requests for comment.Sondheim had previously said that the show would comprise two acts, the first based on the filmmaker’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972), and the second on “The Exterminating Angel” (1962).The musical, he said, was about “trying to find a place to have dinner.”He offered more detail during a 2014 appearance at The New Yorker Festival, explaining that the first act involved a group of people trying to find a place to dine, while the second focused on people who finally did just that — and were trapped afterward in hellish circumstances.The project would have been the composer’s first major musical in more than a decade. His last was “Road Show,” a 2008 collaboration with John Weidman about two brothers constantly looking to strike it rich, which was presented at the Public.“Buñuel” had a mini workshop at the Public in November 2016, with a cast that included Michael Cerveris, Heidi Blickenstaff and Sierra Boggess, with a hoped-for opening date of late 2017. The New York Post reported at the time that Joe Mantello, who directed “Wicked” and the 2004 Broadway revival of Sondheim’s “Assassins,” was set to direct.Cerveris said in an email last week that the first act was essentially complete at the time of the workshop, and the second was “sketched out, but still awaiting much of the music.” He said a later music workshop was planned, but it was canceled so Sondheim could use the time to continue writing.Then, he said, the trail essentially went cold. He said he was sorry to hear of what looks to be the show’s demise.“It was an appropriately surreal, unnerving and often hilarious piece,” he said. “And Steve was, as ever, experimenting with some fascinating, complex musical structures which David’s sensibilities seemed to suit really well, I thought.”Sondheim is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize (in 1985, for “Sunday in the Park With George”) and eight Tony Awards (including one for lifetime achievement), more than any other composer. A film remake of “West Side Story,” for which he wrote the lyrics, is due out at the end of the year. And whenever New York theaters fully reopen, the Classic Stage Company plans to revive “Assassins.”Cerveris said that, despite hearing nothing of “Buñuel” for several years, he had still been hoping for another Sondheim show.“The marriage with Buñuel felt pretty right for the times, and the world has only gotten darker and weirder since then,” he said. “I’d have loved to see it come to be. But then, I will always want more Sondheim in the world.” More

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      ‘Block Association’ Review: Yes, in Your Backyard

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      In this clever show, audience members join a “neighborhood” and lobby for how its discordant residents should to spend a chunk of community money.Mister Rogers was wrong: It isn’t always a beautiful day in the neighborhood.Community is tricky, especially when people’s definitions of it — in their families or circle of friends, in their neighborhood, in their nation and beyond — vary so dramatically. No wonder there’s conflict among the residents of Oak Street in “Block Association Project,” a new interactive show from the Actors Theater of Louisville that works hard to usher us into its fictional suburb, but struggles to articulate its thoughts on political action and democracy.Meet your new neighbors: Elena (Ceci Fernández), a self-interested real estate agent; Aneta (Jane Park), a scholar who struggles with social cues; Emma (Anne-Marie Trabolsi), a pedantic uber-liberal student; Beth (Myra Lucretia Taylor), a wholesome peacemaker; Ryan (John McGinty), whose dog is a cause for discussion; George (Nathan Darrow), a cynical writer who doesn’t want to be bothered; and Rachel (Lauren Lane), the well-meaning self-appointed leader who wants to keep things light and not get political.We’re all gathered on Zoom to discuss how to spend $10,000 in community funds. Easy enough, right? But a conversation about the practicality of a community garden versus a dog park soon spins off into a debate about what the neighborhood stands for, how inclusive it should be and whose values should be represented.Written by Michael Yates Crowley and directed by Michael Rau (the founders of Wolf 359, who most recently collaborated on the immersive workplace drama “Temping,”) for the 2021 Humana Festival of New American Plays, “Block Association Project” actually begins before the Zoom meeting, via a series of association emails that the audience can choose to receive in advance. In them, Aneta sends links to articles about dog attacks, Rachel’s son, Teo (Joe Montoya), interjects to encourage us to donate to the aid organization Border Angels, and George churlishly asks to be unsubscribed.It’s an inventive approach, and for me, quite a surprise to see threads from the residents of Oak Street among press requests and emails from editors in my inbox. It’s not simply the novel nature of the form, however; the emails are a subtle mode of character-building, right down to their signoffs (Elena has a professional signature for her real estate company, while Beth’s is a call to “Think Green”), which made encountering them on Zoom that much more satisfying.I can’t say the same for the full performance, however. Granted, I have never been one for community gatherings, so an experience that strong-arms audiences into interacting isn’t my cup of tea — especially when it’s deployed more for novelty than narrative development.So when discussions fell apart in the meeting, the performers turned to the audience, dividing us into breakout rooms where they moderated short (about six minutes each) debates about the topics on the table, including the association’s leadership and whose votes should be represented. Intermittently we were also asked to participate in Zoom polls, all to foster our investment in this fictional neighborhood.At times these felt like a schoolteacher’s last-ditch attempts to get her class more engaged, when they seemed positioned to act like an urgent call for political involvement — perhaps even an indictment of those who wish to be quiet when urgent action is required.However, the 90-minute show struggled to balance audience participation with its scripted characters and themes. The antisocial writer and the self-serving real estate agent, among the others, feel like no more than petty character types. Almost every character has a breakout moment — a turn in the conversation that leads to a reveal, like Ryan’s story about how he got possession of his father’s dog, and Aneta’s account of her family’s treacherous immigration journey — that is meant to give us something hearty to chew on.The performers labor through those emotional spotlights; Taylor and Lane are amiable but flat, and Trabolsi and Darrow are suitably obnoxious but wholly unsurprising. (Props, though, to the show for being accessible in a way many aren’t, using multiple American Sign Language interpreters, directed by Alexandria Wailes.)In simulating a community meeting, the show includes PowerPoint presentations, including one featuring an illustration of Joe Montoya as the character Teo.Sheyenne Santiago/Actors Theatre of LouisvilleCaught in the muddle of the script are references to the crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico, a debate on the definition of “refugee” and allusions to common hindrances to a working democracy — there’s even a protest of an election result, and a motion to secede. The play uses its small-town community affairs to nod toward the capital-P Politics of our nation right now, but just like Rachel, it’s hesitant to get into specifics and confront the viewpoints and practices that have bolstered our divisive, inequitable body politic.Then again, the show did mint some stars: audience members who turned out to be terrific at improvising on the topics at hand.In my group a couple with a new puppy named Sato were vocal about what they thought community meant and how they thought the Block Association should work. And a woman named Jane, who spoke eloquently about the difference between leading and facilitating, was enthusiastically nominated by my group to be the new head of the Block Association and successfully voted in.Unfortunately, the last several minutes of “Block Association Project” unraveled into what I’ll call a final act phantasmagoria — a move I’ve seen in many shows that aim to break from reality via a poetic unpacking of themes that were never fully tackled.Such purposefully jarring flights of fancy can actually drag a production down, like a cruise ship anchor yanking on a sailboat. In “Block Association Project” it’s a character’s soul-searching monologue (which features both Drake and an Aztec god, by the way) that goes on way too long.Were I to vote on a future for “Block Association Project,” I would urge more precision and a more confident marriage between this community’s banal civics and campaigns with the current troubles of American society. After all, these are the kinds of discussions we’re all now used to having. But, moving on: What’s the next item on the agenda?Block Association ProjectThrough May 1; actorstheatre.org More

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      'Living Newspaper' at the Royal Court Theater Stirs Up Stories of Our Time

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      Tired of reading the headlines? You can watch artistic interpretations of the stories of our era by trailing actors in a Living Newspaper production, section by section.LONDON — Have you had enough of wading through newsprint or scrolling online? The Royal Court Theater has a bracing online alternative that refracts current events through a vibrant and eclectic array of plays that give many of today’s hot-button topics a piquant spin.The self-evident inspiration for “Living Newspaper” is the project of the same name from Depression-era America, a federally funded response to the social concerns of the day that had its origins in the Russian Revolution and saw art as an agency for change.That immediacy tallies with the history of engagement at the Court, a theater that prides itself on taking the temperature of the times. Not for nothing is one of the makeshift spaces adapted for this collection of plays referred to as the Weather Room. (The idea was to reconfigure the Court so that its spaces, onstage or off, approximated the sections of a newspaper.)Kayla Meikle in the solo play “And Now, the Weather,” written by Nina Segal. Helen MurrayAnd what, you might ask, is the forecast? “Unpredictability, volatility and destruction,” announces the actress Kayla Meikle in a solo play by Nina Segal, her reply hinting at a sense of uncertainty, or worse, common to much of the writing here. Its tone cheerful, then chilling, Segal’s play runs less than six minutes and forms part of Edition 5 of an ambitious seven-part venture. The Court is due to reopen to the public in June.The playhouse in Sloane Square, long devoted to new writing, has put the pandemic to culturally productive use. At a time when theater professionals have been reeling from an absence of work, the Living Newspaper has employed over 300 freelancers, two-thirds of them writers and actors. The first four “editions” are no longer available, but Editions 5 and 6 are, with the final one to be available beginning Monday for two weeks. That one will be devoted to writers ages 14 to 21.How can a building work as a newspaper? Surprisingly easily. We experience the stories in different physical places much as we might flick through the news pages. Each “edition” comes with an obituary and advice “pages,” for instance, into which are slotted plays to match. The front page tends to be reserved for a larger-scale piece with music to get the proceedings off to a rousing start.The result has allowed as varied a range of expression as you could imagine, sometimes cheeky and satirical, just as often pointed and polemical. (The Living Newspaper of legend knew a thing or two about agitprop.) The writers include regulars like E.V. Crowe, whose teasing “Shoe Lady” was at the Court last spring just as London theaters were shut down, and Tim Crouch, a maverick actor-writer whose solo play “Horoscopes” shows him at his most wicked as he eviscerates the 12 signs of the zodiac.Nando Messias outside the Royal Court performing a work by Hester Chillingworth.Helen MurrayThemes of empowerment and self-identity recur, just as various forms of the word “apocalypse” betray a prevailing unease. Normalcy exists only to be upended, not least in Crowe’s “The Tree, the Leg and the Axe,” in which two women (Letty Thomas and Alana Jackson, both terrific) sit cozily in the theater bookstore and exult in being “safe ones” far removed from the virus — no masks for them! — only to reveal a landscape marked by savagery.Several plays embrace the environment of the Court. Maud Dromgoole’s witty “Museum of Agony,” a solo piece delivered with sustained brio by Jackson, folds its simmering anger into a discussion about what to order from the theater bar. Episode 6 features an arresting turn from the performance artist Nando Messias, whose “Mi Casa Es Su Casa,” by Hester Chillingworth, concludes with the elegantly clad Messias rising from the outdoor steps of the Court and entering the playhouse, an invitation for us to follow scrawled on the performer’s back.Any of these themes could fuel an entire season in nonpandemic times, especially at the Court, known for keeping an eye on the mood of the moment. It has a history of plays embracing political tensions (one was Jez Butterworth’s “The Ferryman,” set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland) and of casting a wide geographic net. The theater also introduced the notion of the “angry young man” in 1956 with John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” and it courses with palpable emotion here.Tensions in the Middle East fuel several of the plays, like Dalia Taha’s “A Warning,” about planting the seed for revolution in Ramallah in the West Bank. The renewed violence in Northern Ireland propels the bitterly funny “Flicking the Shamrock” by Stacey Gregg. At four minutes, it is beautifully performed by Amanda Coogan and Rachael Merry as women whose preferred forms of sign language (BSL versus ISL) indicate a power-sharing that may not be going according to plan.Cian Binchy in Amy Bethan Evans’s “Neurodiverge-Aunt.” Helen MurrayThe Living Newspaper offers a theatrical potpourri comparable to the Lockdown Plays, which were a highlight of pandemic-era writing and folded in many a recognized name from the Court. As with any newspaper, you can dip in and out, alighting on whichever play catches the eye. I would happily return to Amy Bethan Evans’s cheekily titled “Neurodiverge-Aunt,” in which the wonderful Cian Binchy, who is autistic, ponders the limits of compassion allowed by an advice columnist: “I can’t be your friend because that’s unprofessional.”I laughed out loud at Leo Butler’s “In Memoriam (With Helen Peacock),” in which the actress Nathalie Armin looks back dispassionately at a forbidding list of recent deaths that includes “nuance” and “debate,” which has made it all the way from ancient Greece only to surrender to modern-day trolling.And cheers for Rory Mullarkey’s “This Play,” which describes theater of all styles and structures, including those that have been impossible during the pandemic. At one point, the actress Millicent Wong demands, “Just give me plays again now,” her voice rising. Any devotee of the Court, and its downstairs bar, would surely drink to that.The Living Newspaper continues online through May 9. More

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      How a Multimedia Whiz Became the Go-To for Virtual Productions

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      The projection designer Jared Mezzocchi has become a go-to guy for ambitious virtual productions. Next up: Starring in his own haunted house play.In March 2020, live venues closed, and the theater industry was shocked into numbness. But for the multimedia designer and director Jared Mezzocchi, the moment felt like a ringing alarm.Mezzocchi warmed up in early May by co-directing a livestreamed student production of the Qui Nguyen play “She Kills Monsters” at the University of Maryland, where he is associate professor of dance and theater design and production. The show made imaginative use of filters in Zoom. Who knew that you could generate creature features in an app conceived for office meetings?Numerous projects of diverse sizes and genres followed, playing to strengths Mezzocchi had developed as a projection designer, the person making new images or fashioning existing footage to be shown onstage. He is comfortable in the digital realm, can create a visual environment to tell a story, and has the technical know-how to handle virtual live performances — he is a whiz with Isadora, a software that allows users to mix and edit Zoom on the spot.Highlights have included Sarah Gancher’s acclaimed “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi directed with Elizabeth Williamson; video and web design for “The Manic Monologues”; and multimedia design and direction on Mélisande Short-Colomb’s recent “Here I Am.”Next, Mezzocchi is starring in his own interactive virtual play, “Someone Else’s House,” which starts previews Friday at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.To be sure, Mezzocchi, 35, didn’t wait for March 2020 to get busy. In 2017, for example, he won Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards for his projection design on the Manhattan Theater Club production of Nguyen’s “Vietgone.”But his workload and influence have exploded over the past 13 months. Last September, he further extended his reach by creating the Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo), a think tank, networking hub and problem-solving resource (watch it in action during the live event “Word. Sound. Power. 2021” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday).“He’s unafraid to ask bigger questions and push what’s really possible theatrically,” May Adrales, the “Vietgone” director, said over video.“Someone Else’s House,” produced in association with ViDCo, is yet another experiment for Mezzocchi, who is stepping in front of the camera to recount a haunting story that happened to his family in their home state of New Hampshire.“I’ve never seen myself as a tech person,” he said in an email. “Hell, I was an actor my whole childhood and through grad school. Multimedia became an extension of myself as a storyteller — not the other way around. So this is a really thrilling moment of convergence for me.”Based in Silver Spring, Md., Mezzocchi maintains strong ties to New Hampshire: Since 2015, he has been the producing artistic director at Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, which he attended as a kid and where he now implements many of his ideas about the interconnection of community, art and technology.He discussed them and more in a pair of conversations conducted on — what else? — Zoom.Mezzocchi described the chance to perform “Someone Else’s House,” an interactive play about his family, as a “thrilling moment of convergence for me.” Greg Kahn for The New York TimesDo you think the disappearance of live theater has changed the way we approach storytelling?Without getting into better or worse, I think this period has allowed for more strategies to emerge. Think of TikTok or Snapchat: We hear words with visuals in a way that we weren’t 10 years ago — we’re now telling full stories with a series of memes online. The most successful works I’ve seen this year had technology as a scene partner, not as lipstick and blush. I hope that remains when we get back to in-person.Ideally, what should happen when in-person performances return?First, everyone’s like, “I can’t wait for theater to be back.” I don’t want to nitpick, but I would love us to say: “I can’t wait for in-person theater to allow us to create story inside of a venue again.” People are making performance right now, and we need to embrace that. A lot of theaters are not going to stop the digital marketplace because they’ve seen great value in the accessibility to it. I’m excited for where that takes us when digital performance is a choice rather than survival.Haskell King in “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi co-directed.via TheaterWorks HartfordYou were a video projectionist at the Manhattan nightclub Santos Party House for a few years starting in 2008. How did that influence your theater work?I would spend hours making the perfect thing, and no one would care, and then I would put up a cat video and everyone would cheer! Learning pop culture, learning how to engage with an audience, how to listen to a D.J., how to engage with a band — it became much more musical to me. Sarah Gancher comes from a musical background, and on “Russian Troll Farm” we found ourselves talking about cadence, tempo, percussiveness. It’s not about, “This is what it’s going to look like,” but, “Here’s the energy we’re trying to generate.”In an essay for Howlround Theater Commons, you wrote that “theater must stop making films during the pandemic.” Ouch! Do you think being live defines theater?Absolutely, and that’s unchangeable for me. You make different decisions when you have to make them in the moment, and I think it has to do with audience engagement. If an audience feels like it’s important that they’re there and listening, they’re going to listen differently. And if the performer knows there’s an audience listening in a particular way, it’s going to be different. Is it perfect? Totally not [laughs]. Digital technology’s value system, for whatever reason, is married to spectacle and a different kind of quality. I’ve noticed a lot of people running from liveness so they can get a higher spectacle at a higher quality. I’d rather be rough and dirty and maintain liveness.You often talk about community-building, which has included instituting talkbacks at Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Why is that important to you?It’s important to leverage localism so that we can really understand communities. Right now the only way into a community is often a national tragedy, and that’s too late. How can art help? Well, there’s no tragedy involved when you’re creating something. I love Andy’s because it reminds people that debate is important, and that kids can and should lead a lot of conversations in local environments. They are the reminder that change is beautiful and necessary. More

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      Dark. Messy. Assaultive. Inscrutable. Even From Your Couch.

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      Without international tours, streaming high-concept, director-driven European theater is the next best thing to being there.In October 1973, Arena Stage in Washington took its productions of “Inherit the Wind” and “Our Town” to Moscow and Leningrad for “the first American theatrical performances on the Soviet stage in memory,” according to The New York Times.A teenager named Dmitry Krymov was so bowled over by “Our Town” that he returned the next day. He grew up to become one of the world’s finest theatermakers, and “Our Town” plays a pivotal role in his wonderfully evocative recent memory play, “We Are All Here,” which tracks Krymov’s relationship with Grover’s Corners over the course of his life, and peaks in an emotional gut punch doubling as a visual masterstroke, with the cast lined up on a slowly rising bridge.The good news is that I was able to take in Krymov’s show earlier this month. The less-good news is that I saw it online.And that, in a nutshell, is what the past year has been for fans of border- and boundary-crossing theater: increased access, curtailed experience.Audiences in New York (and other cities that regularly host international companies) have long been able to discover theatrical ideas, techniques and aesthetics that can be radically different from the ones we encounter in the United States.Indeed, American theatergoers can be taken aback by another culture’s conception of the art form. Very roughly, if the playwright, dead or alive, rules in the United States, in Europe it’s the director who is the focus.But as Krymov learned in 1973, opening one’s mind to different possibilities is also incredibly exciting.The main problem is that travel was even harder this past year than it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. And sharing a physical space has always been a key to the more adventurous experiences, the ones that make us question our artistic assumptions: The impact of a show by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine or Poland’s Krystian Lupa can only be fully felt in real life.When you are in the room, you can see how Mnouchkine reconfigures the very idea of the theatrical space by placing movable sets on casters or having the actors get ready for a performance in full view of the audience.In the room, Scott Gibbons’s tectonic soundscapes, which are an integral part of Castellucci productions, feel as if they are pressing on your chest. Audiences entering “The Four Seasons Restaurant” at Philadelphia’s FringeArts festival, in 2014, were handed earplugs, and no, raising the volume on headphones at home just isn’t the same (you can try with another Castellucci show, “Inferno,” available in full on Vimeo).In the room, you can be awed by the supersize scope and the way live and videotaped perspectives intermingle in Ivo van Hove’s “The Damned.”The impact of oversized video imagery, as in this 2018 production of “The Damned,” can’t easily be replicated in a production watched at home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd in the room, you can thrill to an audience’s response to the moment. It’s possibly even more exciting when you’re in the enthusiastic minority in a sea of haters, “Rite of Spring”-style: I can still hear the slaps of seats springing back up as enraged patrons left in the middle of Jan Lauwers’s berserk “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was 20 years ago.But just like that, the pandemic closed borders: we will have to do without outré tableaus from visiting companies for the foreseeable future. The sudden disappearance of international theatrical touring did not make headlines in America last year: Our shellshocked stages went into survival mode, and a much needed discussion of racism in theater took precedence.Obviously I am not begrudging any of that — the reckoning was overdue — but I couldn’t deny the dull ache I felt for what was missing.It was somewhat alleviated, at least, when we switched from glaring at supertitles to glaring at subtitles, as the digital floodgates opened and theaters all over the world began streaming both shows in their repertoires and new projects.Krymov’s “We Are All Here,” for example, was just one of 15 subtitled captures I binged over five days of watching this year’s Golden Mask Festival. These were part of the Moscow-based festival’s showcase section, called Russian Case, which offers works available for tour bookings.Some of them were entrancing even on a screen, like Mihhail Plutahhin’s hypnotic “The Observers,” which consisted of handlers wordlessly moving objects rescued from forced-labor camps this way and that on a table.Yury Butusov’s staging of the Florian Zeller drama “The Son” was so bizarre that it was compelling on its own terms — the actors’ histrionic line readings were refreshingly free of any attempt at psychologizing. The popular writer Vladimir Sorokin’s “Spin” was staged by Yury Kvyatkovsky in a glass house, where we spied a rich family reveling in a decadent boozy brunch via surveillance cameras.Not everything worked, especially the shows that illustrated Regietheater (or director’s theater) run amok, like the incomprehensible commedia dell’arte-influenced production “Pinocchio. Theater.”“Investigation of Horror,” which recreated a soiree of 1930s avant-garde philosophers, complete with real-time potato-peeling and intense debates, looked at times like a “Saturday Night Live” parody. After I admitted, in a postfestival debrief on Zoom, to having been bewildered by a modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” another viewer reassured me by saying, “I’m Russian, I read the book, and I had no idea what was going on.”None of the Russian Case shows I watched were of the naturalistic bent most common in the United States. I never caught a glimpse of characters desultorily chit-chatting on a couch plopped center stage.Come to think of it, there was not much desultory chitchat at all.Yevgeny Mironov, left, as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, in “Gorbachev.” Ira Polyarnaya, via Theatre of Nations, MoscowIn her introductory note to “Investigation of Horror,” the Russian Case curator Marina Davydova wrote: “Watching relationships between characters is getting boring — it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out.”This applied even to the most traditional productions, which always had a twist, like “The Son” and its outré Expressionism, or the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s brilliant bioplay “Gorbachev” having the virtuosic Yevgeny Mironov in the title role as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, change costumes and wigs in full view as their characters age over the course of the show.And Russian Case was just the apex of a year in which I gorged on non-English-speaking theater.It all started last spring, when major companies scrambled to put catalog productions online as soon as their venues shut down — many of them stuck to traditional curtain times and eschewed on-demand, which meant appointment matinees for American viewers.Suddenly, it became easier to see work by directors we have come to know over the years. Berlin’s Schaubühne dug into its archive for full-length shows, including a healthy selection from the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier — a treat for those of us who have loyally trekked to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for his live productions. As of this writing, the prestigious Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris was still streaming a subtitled capture of a contemporary take on Molière’s “The School for Wives.”The most ambitious institution may well have been the Comédie-Française, also in Paris, which started by offering a slew of weekly archival captures (without subtitles) in the spring of 2020. I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”The Comédie-Française’s virtual programming has evolved over the past year as regulations changed, and this 341-year-old grande dame has exhibited enviable verve. When in-person rehearsals were authorized again, the company put its troupe to great use with new initiatives like the table read series “Théâtre à la Table,” which has become increasingly sophisticated (and will remain on YouTube, unlike the full captures).The Comédie-Française’s reading of “The Seagull,” part of a series that is available on YouTube.via Théâtre à la tableThose familiar with “The Seagull” could be tempted by the Comédie-Française’s dynamic reading, led by Guillaume Gallienne as Trigorin and Elsa Lepoivre as Arkadina (they also played the terrible lovers Friedrich and Sophie in “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory).Choices of source material show inventiveness, too, as with a fantastic re-enactment of Delphine Seyrig’s “Sois Belle et Tais Toi” (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a prescient feminist documentary from 1981 in which actresses including Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda talked about sexism in the film industry.Other companies have taken to appointment, blink-and-you-miss-it livestreaming, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam — the company led by van Hove, whose staging of “The Things That Pass” you can catch on April 25.Not long before my Russian immersion, I was on the edge of my, er, couch during the British director Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” for the Amsterdam theater. Even though there was no doubt as to the outcome, the modern-dress production had the intensity of a thriller and I caught myself yelping “no no no no no” out loud as the characters headed toward their fate like asteroids pulled into a black hole by an irresistible gravitational force.Hans Kesting as the title character in Robert Icke’s production of “Oedipus.”Jan VersweyveldThere have even been actual online festivals such as “Stories From Europe,” which presented subtitled captures from members of the theater network mitos21. For a few days in January, we could pretend we were at the Berliner Ensemble, Moscow’s Theater of Nations or the Teatro Stabile Torino. In dark wintertime, that escape felt precious, a window onto a world of possibilities rather than restrictions.In an article for The Times recounting that trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, the Arena Stage associate director Alan Schneider quoted an account in the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper. “Truly,” it said, “the exchange of theater experience, of theater groups, is one of the finest proofs of the willingness of peoples to live in peace, to seek mutual understanding.”If that understanding must happen online for now, so be it. The glass, at least, is half full. More